“Were they having difficulties helping people at their firms change how they work?”

Here’s what they said.

The easy part: benefits

Contributions during the World Cafe

Groups of 15 or so convened for 30 minutes each in a World Cafe format. After a brief description of working out loud – “making your work visible and narrating your work in progress” – each group quickly listed a series of benefits:

makes it easier to spot duplication and identify collaboration opportunities

improves quality and timeliness by getting feedback in the early stages of work

makes it easier to discover and develop knowledge and expertise

helps teams, particularly global teams, feel closer

helps break silos and connect the dots across teams

fosters innovation by allowing more people to use knowledge in different ways

gives people control of their reputation and taps into intrinsic motivation

One woman, with a lovely accent and a sense of the poetic, added “it helps your work develop new routes.”

A simple example from IKEA

“Finding competence”

A woman in the communications division at IKEA told a story of how working out loud helped her team “find competence in unexpected places.” In her area, people around the world have similar jobs managing their local communications sites. Every month, they’d get on a conference call to share information but it wasn’t very effective. The timezones made the call inconvenient for some. And not everyone was comfortable speaking in English. So the calls were dominated by those most confident and awake.

Then the team decided to augment their calls by using their new social platform. And, all of a sudden, “someone who never said anything on the phone was making all these contributions online.” He shifted from being invisible to “becoming influential and a leader in the group.”

“Great,” I said to the others, “now how many stories do you have like this at your firms?”

An uncomfortable truth

As you might expect, most people at a social business conference are used to working out loud themselves. But the number of people doing so at there firms remains woefully low. Even getting people to simply login to a collaboration platform remains a challenge.

This seemed to be true across industries and cultures. Why? All we had were theories and anecdotes:

“Maybe people are too busy.”

“Maybe they’re uncomfortable talking about their work in public.”

“Maybe their managers suppress them.”

“Maybe they’re simply surrounded by people working a certain way and it’s too difficult to work differently.”

“Maybe some people would rather be invisible at work.”

So while more and more companies have social collaboration projects, the pace of change is very, very slow.

Getting started

Evolving the way we work

In answering the question “What can we do?” the groups were both positive and practical. Most agreed that it’s about developing new habits. So that meant using the same techniques that work for changing other habits.

Make it simple. Just changing someone’s home page can make the platform seem much more accessible. And curated suggestions of people, groups, and content relevant to a person’s division and location make the value more apparent.

Start small. Create situations – such as town halls and other events – where people can find material or ask a question and feel the benefits themselves.

Make it safe. Give every team a private online space to make posting seem less risky.

Make it relevant. Provide more content and more integration with daily processes so it’s part of the daily work and not yet another thing to do.

Are we there yet?

After a few years of attending conferences like this one in Berlin, we’ve moved from just talking about the possibilities to having firms of all kinds actively working to change things. We’ve enabled a first wave of experimentation and have our first meaningful sets of stories across a wide range of companies. But how long will it take until a critical mass of people in large firms of working differently?

Later in the week, at a meet-up of early adopters in Frankfurt, I said I thought it would take 3-5 years. When I asked people in the room what they thought, the majority said “a generation.”

Time to get back to work.

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Can you imagine being a doctor at a fast food convention, trying to change the way people eat? Even if the attendees know the food is bad for them, they’ll be surrounded by it and by other people who eagerly eat it, so they’ll eat it too.

To try to help them, you’ll race around frantically, telling them about the benefits of eating right and exercising. Some will nod their heads. “Yes, we really should.” Then they’ll go back to doing what they usually do.

That’s what it can feel like when you talk about making work better in large companies.

Most people know there are better ways of working. They know their daily practices aren’t good for them. They know they’re not engaged. But for most of them it just feels too difficult to change.

So what do you do? Give up on all those unfulfilled people?

The Work Revolution Summit

Yesterday, I was fortunate to be admitted to the Work Revolution Summit where I could “join leading entrepreneurs, startup investors, futurists, organizational designers, and technology experts to fundamentally re-design the way we work.”

One of the organizers was Jessica Lawrence, who is both former CEO of the Girl Scouts and organizer of the NY Tech Meetup for entrepreneurs. One of the objectives of the summit was to help start-ups maintain “a ‘human’ company culture that helps both the employees and the company reach their full potential as the organization grows and scales.” And Jessica gave a fascinating talk about trying to change the culture while she was CEO.

There were several other great speakers, including Seth Godin. And I got to ask him a question about what to do when your are, in essence, a doctor at the fast food convention.

A question for Seth Godin

Seth Godin’s daily blog has done more to change how I approach work than anything else. And each time I hear him speak, I’m inspired to do more. This time, I had the chance the to ask him “What do you do when you’re preaching change and and it seems like only a small minority is interested in actually changing?”

He told me something that I know is right but I’ve had trouble putting into practice. Don’t preach to everybody. Don’t try to reach everybody. Many people are simply trying to hold onto their job and it’s too scary/hard/uncomfortable for them to do something different. Instead, find the people who are ready and eager for change. Connect them to build a tribe who wants to change. And equip and empower that tribe to extend the movement (giving them credit and control when they do).

A shift in tactics

The first NYC Marathon in 1970

I was 6 years old when the first NYC Marathon took place in 1970. Only 127 people ran that race. Only 55 finished. And about 100 people watched. No one I knew heard of it. No one I knew ran at all. At the time, running a marathon seemed ridiculous.

41 years later, almost 47,000 people finished and almost 2 million people lined up along the route. It’s become the largest marathon anywhere in the world. And even I completed one.

Running marathons didn’t spread because Fred Lebow, the original organizer, went around telling everyone about the benefits of running. Instead, all 6 sources of influence came into play. Over time, there was more help to get you started and more motivation at the personal, social, and structural levels. More running books, more equipment, more races, more clubs, more visible rewards. Over the course of a generation, more and more people just did it.

Growth of a tribe

So of course changing how people work isn’t simply about telling people. We’ll have to keep making it easier to work out loud. Keep writing about it and teaching it. Keep connecting advocates and equipping them to extend their own networks.

Just now, I joined the work revolution where I pledged “I will do whatever I can within my sphere of influence to promote workplaces that are profoundly human and deeply meaningful.”

This post describes how purposeful communities can make improvements that could easily be in the 10s of millions.

The problem

As a firm gets larger, there’s usually more distance between the people who pay for things and the people who use those things. That’s certainly true for personal consumption (printing, etc) and previous posts described ways to reduce that kind of spend.

But the problem is even bigger when it relates to consumption at the team level or at the departmental or firm level. The cost of that server or database license, for example, is something that individuals don’t think about or have much control over. They just order it to get their job done. (The government mechanic doesn’t want to spend extra for a hammer, but he has no idea how to procure a cheaper one.)

To control costs, firms typically focus on policies, contracts, governance processes, and vendor management groups. While these approaches can be useful, they typically don’t leverage the knowledge of people actually using the products and services. Now, it’s easier than ever to do that.

The solution

One way to bridge the gap between a firm’s consumers and payers is to organize communities around specific kinds of work. Then, you influence people in the communities to look for ways they can eliminate waste or otherwise get more value for money the firm spends related to the work they do.

Two specific kinds of communities include role-based communities of practice and vendor communities. For example, an IT department would have communities organized around specific roles such as developers, testers, and project managers. As a natural part of doing the work – e.g., posting questions, sharing lessons – community members can expose process deficiencies and work out better ways of optimizing the use of shared resources.

Another way to organize communities would be to connect people who use the products or services of a particular vendor. Far too often, it’s the vendor who knows more about how their products are being used inside the firm and they’re motivated to increase revenue, not reduce costs. So if Oracle, say, is one of your top providers, you’d want to identify and connect your top users of Oracle products and have them actively participate in troubleshooting, shaping standards, and evaluating the need for new products and services.

There’s a wide variety of ways communities can find value. (Nick Milton identified “17 value delivery mechanisms for Communities of Practice”, from solving problems to collaborating on purchasing to exchanging equipment to coaching.) You can think of these communities acting as centers of excellence for every role or vendor. Except these aren’t distinct groups, separated from the work and formed by appointment. Instead, they’re made up of people deeply embedded in the work and formed by those with the most to contribute.

Examples I’ve seen firsthand include a case in which started with a post in a testing community about the acquisition of expensive software. The subsequent discussion prompted members to form a working group which came up with a better licensing arrangement and saved several million dollars. In other cases, teams avoided spending hundreds of thousands on new equipment because experts in the community solved performance problems shared online.

Like the Shell example, hard dollar savings in a few communities could add up quickly with even a few wins. Large firms can easily spend more than $50 million with major vendors like Oracle, IBM, and HP. And so connecting the experts in your firm who are most familiar with how those vendor offerings are used can make it possible to find your own “dry wells”.

In addition to the big wins, we also see many, many small improvements with harder-to-quantify benefits. Things like faster access to expertise by new joiners, shorter problem resolution times, and incremental process improvements.

In one case, for example, a community member posted a simple complaint about poor response times from a 3rd party service provider. The post received 2500 views and comments from dozens of teams sharing their own stories of waste and frustration. That made the problem and its consequences so visible that management announced changes to the vendor engagement.

When management announced the change in the community, their post received over 4000 views and dozens of comments like “thank you for making us more productive”. How much did we save by improving the productivity of dozens of teams and turning their frustration into gratitude?

Why doesn’t everyone do it?

Etienne Wenger, who’s the intellectual father of communities of practice, wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2000 about the 3 reasons why they aren’t more prevalent.

“The first is that although communities of practice have been around for a long time—for centuries, in fact—the term has just recently entered the business vernacular. The second is that only several dozen forward-thinking companies have taken the leap of “installing” or nurturing them. The third reason is that it’s not particularly easy to build and sustain communities of practice or to integrate them with the rest of an organization. The organic, spontaneous, and informal nature of communities of practice makes them resistant to supervision and interference.”

That last reason is the one we’ve struggled with the most. Communities aren’t so much about systems as they’re about people. People need recognition, role models, support, and much more to maintain the structure and vitality found in successful communities. And so we’ve found it difficult to build and sustain role-based and vendor communities.

But they’re worth it.

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In addition to the core infrastructure, add all the different applications – content management systems, Sharepoint, blogs, wikis, etc. Then add the engineers that customize the tools to make them look like modern websites. Then add the people dedicated to producing the newsletter and e-zines and other corporate content.

How much does all of that cost? You probably have no idea.

It turns out that most large firms can comfortably reduce their total intranet spend by $3 million to $7 million if you effectively use modern social platforms and practices.

If I want a beautiful, mobile-friendly, professional website complete with social features, analytics, and more, I can create one in a few minutes for free. Maybe add a few dollars a year to eliminate ads or select a premium design.

Now try and do that at work. You’ll be pointed to a variety of poorly integrated tools, most of which will require customization to have basic features like comments and customizable pages. And that customization, multiplied by 100s or even 1000s of websites, adds up. (A popular statistic, cited here and here, is that for every dollar a firm spends on Sharepoint licenses, they spend $6 to $9 on customization.)

Worse, there are a lot of people involved in producing and governing content. Traditionally, we’ve relied on dedicated communications professionals tell employees the news of the organization. They’re often gatekeepers, too, deciding whether you’re even allowed to have a presence on the intranet. Now, though, the news spreads much more quickly and cheaply, and Communications departments must either be smaller or change what they do.

The solution

The solution involves replacing traditional intranet tools with a social platform and replacing traditional Comms practices with a greater reliance on employees publishing and sharing information.

A modern social platform makes self-publishing at work as easy as it is at home. They tend to support a wide range of content (sites, documents, video, photos, blogs, discussions). Search works extremely well. And the best ones have social and mobile features as core elements of the platform. In all the benchmarking we’ve done, almost every firm that introduced a modern platform has eliminated old tools and greatly reduced their use of dedicated staff or design firms for customization.

And when it comes to content, you may still need people to craft the latest org announcement or news about quarterly earnings. But, since around 2008, people have increasingly relied on social filters for their news rather than professional curators. It’s the popularity and ease-of-use of social platforms that are the cause of that shift.

When everyone can publish, the information flow in your organization can be more relevant, more real-time, and cheaper than ever before.

What’s it worth?

The reduction of communications costs comes in 3 areas.

Consolidating the intranet: Firms I’ve spoken to have eliminated up to a dozen or more applications and hundreds of websites. That reduces software licenses, hardware, and engineers who develop and support the tools. In all cases I know of that have pursued an intranet consolidation strategy, the savings exceeded $1 million.

Customization: This is one of the most insidious and often the most poorly-controlled costs because it’s typically found in pockets throughout the firm without any central oversight. Combined, my estimate is that large firms spend between $2 million to $10 million on intranet customization by staff and by 3rd-party design firms. (My own group, for example, once spent over $100,000 customizing Sharepoint to support our communities of practice. I’ve heard of internal sites at some firms costing 5x or even 10x that amount. And a large firm might have 100s of groups doing customization of some kind.)

The era of spending large sums tweaking intranet sites should be over. Firms should slash their customization costs by at least 50% for savings between $1 million to $5 million.

People editing content: Perhaps the most contentious and political category is the number of people producing official content and governing the intranet. Of course, most Communications departments do far more than this. But a considerable subset of what they do is “focused on the announcement of management conclusions and the packaging of management thinking into messages for mass distribution to the ‘troops'”.

Adding up all of the work related to this subset could easily equate to 50 people across a large firm. And this should be reduced by at least 20%. Assuming a fully-loaded cost of $100,000 per person, that’s another $1 million in savings.

Why doesn’t everyone do it?

The biggest barriers seem to be control and fear. The people who own their particular tool or website cling to it as part of their value to the firm. And it’s the rare person who actively seeks to reinvent their job while trying to keep it.

“No longer can we afford to (only) cascade messages down from the top. Our organizations have become too complex and too slow to rely upon such an antiquated method. We need to be more nimble, transparent, and inclusive.”

He then points out that the story can be about more than cutting communications costs. It can be about changing the very work of Communications to make it more useful and meaningful:

“…Even though I advocate a future where everyone is a communicator, communications professionals still have a pivotal role to play: helping others, throughout the organization, to become better communicators, and highlighting the best of employee contributions, while also reinforcing key messages around strategy and values. Such reinforcement aids in prioritization, so that scarce resources are more productive on the right things.”

In addition to saving millions, such a change would be good for the firm and all the people in it.

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I was talking with two more large firms this week about modernizing work and they were sharing the challenges they’re facing. One firm is considering buying a social business platform and the other wants to make even better use of the platform they already have. And for all of the many differences between the companies I see, it turns out we tend to face the same questions, in roughly the same sequence, time after time.

As a company evolves, the questions shift from fear of the unknown to a desire for utility to excitement about innovative possibilities. And the answers tend to be – or can be – the same across companies.

Knowing the questions and answers in advance might help you modernize your firm more quickly. Or at least provide some comfort that others are sharing in the same challenges and struggles.

“Can we do that?”

If you suggest using a social platform at work, you’ll quickly face a range of concerns from different departments – compliance, legal, HR, data privacy, data security, IT – and it can be overwhelming.

It’s work to sort through the rules. To do the research and benchmarking so you know what others have done. To meet with each department and have the same meeting multiple times until they’re comfortable. To write the policies and guidelines. But the short answer is “Yes, you can do that.” Hundreds of large firms have shown that, if you do the work, you will absolutely be able to get past this initial question.

“What if people say something they shouldn’t?”

People are messy. If there are enough people using your platform, someone somewhere will indeed post something that’s offensive, wrong, in violation of your terms & conditions, or just stupid.

The good news is that this rarely happens. By not allowing anonymous posts, you greatly limit the most egregious behavior. In addition, platforms support a “report abuse” feature which allows posts to be hidden (and subject to moderation) with a single click if you like. In addition, all posts can be retained and monitored.

After 16 months, we’ve had less than two dozen questionable posts and all were resolved without invoking the moderation process. Not all firms are so lucky, but none that I’ve met have found objectionable behavior to be a major problem.

“What’s it worth?”

You’ll face this question when you first consider using a platform and you’ll continue to face it for almost the entire life of your project. I avoided answering it at first – “It’s too hard to calculate the ROI!” – and that was a mistake.

It turns out there’s an entire class of collective efficiency ideas that will pay for your collaboration program many times over. Even before you work with businesses to generate more revenue, you can gain credibility and trust by using social tools and practices to identify and eliminate waste. (Some may even change your culture and save lives.)

“Will anyone use it?”

Before we started, we really didn’t know how many people would use our platform. Our own team’s estimates turned out to be woefully low compared to what actually happened.

But that’s not a guarantee. Too many firms treat collaboration as an IT project and wind up surprised when they hit a plateau, having exhausted the supply of eager early adopters.

Still, almost all firms wind up getting a critical mass using their platform within the first year or two. People seem to naturally like the ease of publishing and the interaction. But your firm will want more than that, and the questions get harder from here on.

“Is it official?”

You’ll face this question after you have significant activity on the platform but before the institution itself – namely Comms and senior managers – have embraced it.

For Comms, it’s often a question of control and of sunk costs. If a group has invested in a web site and is the only one who can publish on it, they’re more likely to resist the tide of self-publishing that comes with modern platforms. For executives, they’re simply waiting for Comms – or for other executives – to show them that it’s worth their time and that it’s safe.

This is one of those questions that fades over time. More and more groups will opt for the ease, the interaction, and the social features of a modern platform. Those groups will influence other groups to do the same, and the old intranet controlled by Comms will, slowly, fade away.

For an increasing number of firms, their social platform is the intranet. What’s “official” will be more a question of who is doing the publishing than which content management system you use. And that’s how it should be.

“Will businesses use it?”

Some divisions will be more likely to make use of the social platform than others. IT, for example, is typically more comfortable with the tools and might place more value on social recognition than, say, salespeople.

The key to engaging people beyond the early adopters is to focus on specific use cases that help specific sets of people become more effective. Social isn’t the headline, value is.

For businesses, that typically means relying more heavily on curated content (e.g., information about clients) and on ready-made networks to provide support or answer questions (e.g., client teams and product teams). It also means a relentless drive for greater convenience, adapting your platform for a businessperson’s everyday workflow instead of trying to adapt businesspeople to your platform.

This is hard. And the only times I’ve seen firms come close to making progress is if they have a small center of excellence that can spend dedicated time in the field working on business-specific use cases and flows.

“What else can we do with it?”

If you get this question, take a moment and savor it. It means you’ve come a long way and put most of the other questions behind you. It means people in your company have moved beyond the basics and the barriers and are open to new possibilities.

Very few firms are at this stage. (We hear this question only occasionally.) But as you grow your portfolio of value stories, as more people use your platform for everyday work, as your culture shifts to one of greater openness and genuine collaboration, you’ll hear this question more and more. And you’ll be bounded only by your creativity and inspiration.

Getting to the 7th question

It seems more and more companies are tired of being 10-15 years behind what we see on the Internet. Frustrated with the overwhelming amount of email and meetings used to share information. And genuinely worried about the lack of engagement and the lack of appeal for younger generations.

We’re only in the second year of that shift and it may take 3-4 more years, maybe longer. Meeting with other companies and writing this post reminds me of how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go.

How about you? Are their other questions you face? Would you like to meet and compare progress and challenges? By sharing what works and what doesn’t, we can all make work more effective and more fulfilling, more quickly.